—FOR SO I CALL MYSELF THIS DAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963, for today I have become dearer to myself by becoming disengaged from one man and engaged to another. Until something better comes along, we both said. I felt a bit mad a good part of this historic day. I have mourned everywhere.
All day, I’ve wandered. Perhaps I’m better suited to live in a spirit world where the members of my lost family hold up its four corners—Mama, Daddy, Ruben, and little Timothy. He’s too little to stand in the corner alone, just two years older than I was then. The four spirits of the little Negro girls visit them. My father was ever gracious, loved all children. Suffered them to come.
Taught us to shoot.
Even in the spirit world, I hover around the fringes, am not quite admitted.
No. Now I am cozy in my room, and the walls keep out the world that has purposefully slain a president, randomly murdered innocent children, spawned cyclones to demolish families, created illness and suffering of every imaginable and unimaginable kind. Made us to long for a wholeness we can lose but never possess. Yet I am cozy in my room.
On my four bedroom walls hang paintings, like shields, whose creator is none other than the man, the artist, to whom I am engaged to be married! Engaged on a well-lighted city bus plowing through the night.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire! But so what!? And why not, if it’s what I myself choose? And if my choice hurts no one but myself.
Does it hurt Don?
No. For he has chosen, too. That is, if this step damages him in some way I am not guilty because the injury comes from his own willful decision making.
I feel so naked here. Shedding guilt. Writing in my own book. It has cleared my head of the madness. I hope never again to come so close to the abyss and shall fight hard to keep my curious feet (in their olive shoes) from—
But what of Don? And of the fact that I scarcely know him?
Do we know life?
No, but we marry it just the same, and whether we want to or not. It’s folly to think one can choose wisely, and so why not choose spontaneously?
I died inside when he said we could stop whenever I liked. What did I have to do with it? I was under the illusion that we were acting on our mutual desires and inclinations. But he meant to be reassuring. Even I acknowledge his good intentions. But the sentiment doesn’t suit me. Headlong. I like headlong and no regrets. Je ne regrette rien.
Perhaps I can’t be pleased and should simply hate myself for my failure.
Perhaps this engagement—here’s the ring on my thumb—is a joke. An act of spontaneous theater—merely amusing. No! I infuse it with meaning. We were not joking. Or, the joke has evolved, broken the back of its hard chrysalis to flutter forth, transformed. Until. Unless.
Don’s paintings hang around me in the dim light of this bedroom. They have come unnamed, like children, but I name one, done only in shades of brown and tan, The Nile River Sideways, for it resembles a kind of crack in the earth, with tributary cracks. Sideways, because it divides its space horizontally, though I always think of the Nile as south-north, vertical, parting the desert. And another I name Opulent Odalisque, for it is touched with gilt, and while the forms are all abstract ovals, they seem to recline on one another rather like a woman might lounge back into unbelievable wealth. Well—
REALLY IT IS NOT the paintings but this dim light filtering into my chamber that swaddles me and asks for words.
My room is not all inwardness, for light from the streetlamp filters through the shades, and I remember how at night in the summer long ago I played under the streetlight with the neighborhood kids and my brothers. With Ruben (which means “firstborn” in Hebrew, doubtlessly named so by my mother) and Timothy (as in the books of the New Testament, no doubt read and loved by my Methodist father with his true-hawk nose and the red spider veins emanating at the juncture of nostril-flange and face). But I was writing of playing hide-and-seek outside at night, and something in me rejoins those shadow children.
I have fallen down, and so have taken time out to sit on the curb and press my elbow with my skirt. I am five, and I have not guessed that I am more than brushed by my encounter with the pavement. Yet when I look at my skirt, I have printed it with blood from my skinned elbow. I have printed three shapes, like hearts, on my skirt as I pressed my elbow against the cloth of my skirt.
My elbow was still covered—I remember—with a thick scab when the car rolled, and they were killed. But I don’t want to think of that. A young doctor in the hospital asked me, “How are you today?” And I must have said fine because then he asked if I knew what had happened. I said I had played too rough and skinned my elbow. I showed my old scab to him.
I must have been a little out of it then, but I will not think about that. It was long ago.
I’m here in my room at my aunts. Aunt Krit, never married, the maiden schoolteacher, peculiar. (I could become her.) Aunt Pratt, older, widowed, a mother but her son lost, a deserter from war, half mad with anxiety about him and the arthritis that leaves her bedridden. (I will not become her, except for her brave love for whoever crosses her path. For me.) The same streetlight shines through the shades, and I can see the abstract paintings of my beloved looking in on me as though they hung on the walls of my mind. I have escaped the city, the world of accident and murder. I dwell not in the house of the Lord forever and ever, but in the room of my mind, here in the house of my aunts.
But what was it I wanted to say when I began to write in my book? That I am here and safe.
That’s not enough. The people of my city—so many people feel…So many do not imagine him as a human like themselves. What I realize is that I still love these people. I am apart from them—I feel so lonely!—but this city is my home and they are my people.
Why am I more slain by assassination than by the murder of four Negro girls?
There is something wrong with my heart. I will change myself.
My heart convulses with sadness and terror.
Oh, I see a dark house! I know that desolate house. It is next door, the one I grew up in. And the day before Aunt Krit sold it, she invited the neighbors to come and look around for anything they wanted to take. Then she sat in this house, with our lights out, and she called to me, “Come see, Stella. They’ve come with their torches.”
Torches, she said, and I was alarmed because I thought they might be about to burn the house down, from the inside. I thought it ruthless of her to discard the furniture, ruthless to sell the house. These days she mumbles about the Negroes at Helicon, how they may be trying to establish squatters’ rights on her property.
But what she meant by torches was flashlights, and I saw the beams of light shooting through the dark house at strange angles. It was as though the house was being skewered by light beams. I sat down beside her on the daybed that was against the windows. We looked out across the driveway, black as the river Styx, and she held my hand.
“Must you sell the house?” I asked in a small voice.
“I’ll need the money, saved at compound interest, to send you to college.”
She was the person who told me of the massacre of the Jews. Of the camps and the ovens. Sitting at the kitchen table, watching a faucet drip, I found her information too terrible to believe. Though I respected her, I reserved a corner of doubt. Of course she told the truth, in spite of my childish disbelief. Perhaps my incredulity was pride. How could she know so much more than I?
I’m tired and must sleep. I’ve had my day. I ventured from this bed and had a day of wandering and of planned commitments. A phantasmagoria of voices and visions and revisions. Of cruelty and kindness. A new engagement.
What do I love about Don? His posture—the way he walks in the world. That’s almost enough. But his wit, too. His kindness to Cat and to me. That he paints.
But what was that I wanted to remember? That I must change my life. The deserted house and the shafts of light prying everywhere.